oh crap, it knows i like cindy lauper...

What I really want to do right now is sit down and pour out a passion-infused entry detailing how I’ve fallen deeply in love with the city of San Francisco. This love is not new, but I think I’ve unilaterally elevated the seriousness of our relationship to the next level. I’m so exhausted and brain weary, however, from almost 3 weeks of constant movement (which explains the inexcusable lack of entries lately) and stiff hotel sheets that I cannot do it justice. It will have to wait. Maybe for awhile.

But I did run into a little tidbit today that I found really interesting. There’s this company in Oakland, Savage Beast Technologies (I really like the fact that they base their name on one of my favorite quotes, check the webpage), that’s working on a really cool project called the Music Genome Project. This project will result in something that’s in essence nothing revolutionary: it will lend itself to a program where if you decide you like a song or an album, it will refer you to other similar music that you might like as well.

What distinguishes this company is the sophistication of their analysis. Instead of relying on something as simple as genre-matching or market research (where they identify patterns of people’s purchases to make connections between shared musical affinities, and hence, make recommendations to those who might not be aware of the other bands), they are attempting to break the songs down into their fundamental musical elements. To accomplish this, they utilize a team of experts highly educated in music theory, along with pretty wicked technology to categorize the music into particular subsets. These subsets might be something like ‘A minor theme with alternating F/G subtext’ or ‘violin coupled with electric acoustic’. This would result in traditionally unmatched music being matched together. A lot of time, this would probably be for the best. It will allow listeners to find that it’s not so easy to dismiss whole genres of music because there are overlapping elements in each. This program essentially digs deep into our subconscious to identify the basic components we like in our music to recommend other similar stuff we probably never would have looked into.

Like I mentioned, this is fundamentally the same thing you’d encounter when shopping on Amazon or at you local Best Buy (a customer of Savage Beast, apparently waiting to incorporate the Genome technology in the near future), but with a MUCH larger inventory of music and more sophisticated methods of matching potentially attractive tunes for anyone and everyone.

In an industry where 3% of the available products account for 80% of sales (which might be attributable to the surfeit of bad music, but, more likely is attributable to the reigning promotional/record companies holding sway over most consumers’ tastes=buying habits), this tells me that the little guys are going to have an increasingly better chance of getting their names circulating.

So if any of my super-cool, band playing friends are reading this entry, keep your eyes out for this technology that’s starting to be introduced and make sure that you get your stuff into their libraries. For people like me, who have always found it difficult to stay up on the mass of underground releases that often times prove the most innovative and interesting musically, this tool should help us stop buying Britney (impossible!) and look into something more worthwhile. In the same vein as blogging and podcasting, I see this tool as yet another weapon for those with talent (obviously not referring to this blog) but short on lucky breaks to promulgate their creations to a wider audience. Even for those without talent, keep in mind that Nelson made millions. It’s the dissemination of ideas that attracts me here. So keep playing that dulcimer because somebody listening to Nickel Creek might just spot you and give you a shove down the road to fame and fortune.